People before systems

A conversation with Accenture CIO Andrew Wilson

CIOs should start thinking in terms of outcomes, not
technology

Culture and business problems should drive tech
investments

Commercially available platforms can extend a
company’s IT capabilities

Andrew Wilson has a vision for how IT can power a modern
organization. Accessing information and services at work is as easy as
it is at home. Technologists are able to anticipate employee needs.
The CIO acts more like a chief experience officer.

In a recent
conversation with Dave Schneider, ServiceNow’s chief
revenue officer, Wilson talked about the ongoing revolution in
corporate IT, the role of platforms in enterprise tech strategy, and
how the right media strategy can drive buy‑in from your employee culture.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How do you approach your role at Accenture?

I think it starts when you wake up in the morning and realize that
everything you did that made you successful as a CIO is no longer
enough. The dramatic changes in the technology industry, in cloud, in
automation, and analytics, means you have to completely redefine the
skills that you need to be successful.

A digital transformation strategy is equal parts technology, talent,
and change. From a technology perspective, we're 90% in the cloud. But
that [alone] will not get me to success.

The next thing I have to do is make the team that looks after that
technology much more successful. They have to have a set of skills in
things that a few years ago didn't exist and an imagination that’s a
long way away from coding and building things in the data center.

And then, probably the biggest change of all is, I've got to think
in terms of outcomes. None of these services exist for the leaders or
the deployers of that tech. They exist for the end user, for the
customer, the employee.

A modern digital transformation strategy is all about the human.
There's an irony in that: In these days of ultra‑fast technology, the
human is at the heart of everything. For my user base, it's about
[having] a great time at work. It's about attracting and retaining
[employees]. It's about making the process of joining Accenture much
more fluid.

We have over 100,000 people join us a year. You can't be
old‑fashioned. You can't have them filling out forms. It's got to be
really sticky. They've just come up from talking to Alexa. They've
just come from watching YouTube. If the services at work don't feel
like that, I'm not doing my job.

Tell me about how you work with the lines of business to build
experiences for employees.

Don't think in terms of the system you're going to build. That's
really the last step. If your culture and your business transformation
aren't driving what you're doing, then you're only putting a patch on things.

How do you define platforms and why are they important?

Platforms run the IT ecosystem today and really give you a lot of
investment that you couldn't possibly make as an individual organization.

Accenture runs on a small number of big platforms like ServiceNow
and Microsoft. My job is to make the platforms work together [so we
achieve] cross‑platform integration in the cloud. It’s a bit techie,
but really important, because now I'm brokering, I'm orchestrating,
and I'm serving up change potential in the organization.

Are you reaching customers as well as employees?

Yes, we are federated with hundreds of organizations. And when we
talk about workforce, by the way, I don't just mean the humans any
more. I'm talking about automation. We have tens of thousands of
non‑human workers, and they exist alongside our human workforce, and
they have to complement each other.

Can you explain some of the mechanisms that you're using to reach
your employees and partners?

Shut down websites. Shut down email. No one will look at them, and
no one will go near them. Use television because YouTube and Netflix
are the way our post‑millennial workforce communicates.

I want to be able to offer live television shows. I want to have
security training be like the TV show “24,” where we dropped a season
and people play it on replay. Use techniques like that, and have fun.